Sown Sundered of Self and Son
By Whitt Castle
But Bernhard, he said that "one never knows who one is," sayin' that "the others tell you who you are, don't they? and [that] as you're told so a million times if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all who you are. Everyone says something different," and that fucking "you yourself also say something different each new moment," but see, I just don't buy it, can't see myself as anything but myself, the I am me that mine myself meets alone when reposal rended bedwise, know what I mean, fuckin' bemong the swarming dark of angels descending as locus on the gutted virgin's flesh, the plague's thereon devourment in the silence screamt silent self-sundered of son and seed. Hello.
But that's what Pa'd say, dying in the back he'd say that the locus'd be descending on these virgins any day now, any-fuckin'-day now, that their flesh'd be swifted in the gorge of Bejeevus on the land, Sin Save Us.
He sits watching the day swirl above his bed in back, behind the house where the brush runneth and sun warmeth and the bugs they bed down in his ears. She sends me out, the prodigal of conscripted return, sends me to scoop the bugs fuckin' in the tuft of his earball. Ha'n't been back long enough to tend wet his death rattle, yet the fuck of family has me sweatin' spit-to-shit, splittin' wood in the crack of night, Sweet Bejeevus about me, mannered in his earthly manor, fucking nymphs just beyond the crust of dark in the wheeze of trees gusted to hush yond the house's cleared surround whereof nascence donkey-punched me without the womb to free fall to the good dirt Ma stood straddled above, Pa past the stumps fistin' the oak of lingered breadth that oversaw our Crime of Life, ashamed then of the tears born of him.
Then this cock-eyed prick, he said that "perhaps its inevitable," dig'um, articulating his perhaps that "one has to choose," fucking choose, "between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is," like we're all hog-tied to this fucking headboard existence and there looming in the lurch of lust and violence is Life with fucking chloroform fresh on His knuckles and you can't fucking scream, you can't fucking scream cos he's a ball-gag duct-taped tight in your gullet leaving moaning the only sound you can and will not make, screaming hateful fear flared wet through your red nostrils and the rope is thick but perhaps just thick enough to budge, the swarm of angels descending to savage ravaged he whose shadow crests your brow.
She used to sit with him, when he first demanded to be moved outside. It took seven of us, the Brewster boys past the quarry with us three Rex boys, strapped tight in sinewy youth but that sum'bitch bore a five foot girth in gut alone, laded leaden in the wallow of worship and pork-whiskey. Ma took the neck, wouldn't let anyone take the neck, and what with Pa's namesake, Steven, gripping thigh-wide ankles, and solemnal Solomon handfullin' Pa's right asscheek and me grippin' a good chunk of cheek myself, we grunted that motherfucker four whole feet 'fore his five hundred pounds bore itself gravity-bidden onto the barrow plank Steven threw together the night before.
Back then she would sit with him, and when the hiss of his lungs cracked to cough, spasms that buckled the beast, she would rub his chest, beneath the sun and moon, she would stroke his woolen chest, bare to glare still the pallid palling beneath the peppered-white thicket, and hum the hymnals of Bejeevus the Abject till Pa's settled throes whistled contrapuntal to her tight-lipped melody.
But Pa's been dying some time now, angel-ravaged or not, and I think Ma has had her fair share of shit. Tendin' death sucks fuck-luck outta skunks, licks pig prick to prig, dig? And he ain't fakin'. Jesus were he fakin', Bejeevus bedamn us—if he were fakin', I would bleed to earth that'un hoggen-wilde, fuckin' gut to ground his being in soil.
But he ain't fakin', been dyin' for years, seen him shit barf and sneeze cum, the man's just fallin' apart. Fucker of it all is that we don't know when the mass is going to pass, how long he can last, and if his dyin' word won't be the final function of Folly fain to fuck us all. But the man of burden is the burden of man, Blessed Bejeevus Bemused, as the child burdens till burdened—birth-written as heir damned air to err, he's sewn in me the seed of his undoing.
We played cards across his width when we were younger, though we ain't aged much now—Solomon pushin' driving, Steven pushin' teen, myself no caked out cracker yet—when Ma 'n Pa wept proud wet hot into my chest, my shakin' palms, they cursed me the first of them to matriculate, to wander urban the sprawl, past the confines of the oaken woods, branches noosed to swing Death in the black rustle of the courting night. So I went, I went and I saw and I lived like no other, burnt bridges and fucked queens, motherfucker, I've seen enough shit to know better, though shit if I've seen enough.
And she weeps. She always weeps come three, when he used to gather us for prayer, robed to hood in the black, purple, and grey of Bejeevus' Stigmatic Bruise. She misses that, Ma misses that about him. He was a passionate man, once.
She weeps now. It's three. Glare-beaten by the sun's relent ahind clouded walls of white, I consider again the blade in my boot, its serrate serenade cooing the calm of Pa's throatal length. I listen to Ma weep, and sigh fogged resolve onto the gleam unsheathed from Jocasta's brooch in the pale burn of fucking Phaeton's flaming flail arcing fatherless into the morrow.
- - -
I am a writing instructor for an online college as well as the local community college here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I have been published in the West Wind Review, Negative Suck, and here in Weirdyear.
By Whitt Castle
But Bernhard, he said that "one never knows who one is," sayin' that "the others tell you who you are, don't they? and [that] as you're told so a million times if you live a long life, in the end you don't know at all who you are. Everyone says something different," and that fucking "you yourself also say something different each new moment," but see, I just don't buy it, can't see myself as anything but myself, the I am me that mine myself meets alone when reposal rended bedwise, know what I mean, fuckin' bemong the swarming dark of angels descending as locus on the gutted virgin's flesh, the plague's thereon devourment in the silence screamt silent self-sundered of son and seed. Hello.
But that's what Pa'd say, dying in the back he'd say that the locus'd be descending on these virgins any day now, any-fuckin'-day now, that their flesh'd be swifted in the gorge of Bejeevus on the land, Sin Save Us.
He sits watching the day swirl above his bed in back, behind the house where the brush runneth and sun warmeth and the bugs they bed down in his ears. She sends me out, the prodigal of conscripted return, sends me to scoop the bugs fuckin' in the tuft of his earball. Ha'n't been back long enough to tend wet his death rattle, yet the fuck of family has me sweatin' spit-to-shit, splittin' wood in the crack of night, Sweet Bejeevus about me, mannered in his earthly manor, fucking nymphs just beyond the crust of dark in the wheeze of trees gusted to hush yond the house's cleared surround whereof nascence donkey-punched me without the womb to free fall to the good dirt Ma stood straddled above, Pa past the stumps fistin' the oak of lingered breadth that oversaw our Crime of Life, ashamed then of the tears born of him.
Then this cock-eyed prick, he said that "perhaps its inevitable," dig'um, articulating his perhaps that "one has to choose," fucking choose, "between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is," like we're all hog-tied to this fucking headboard existence and there looming in the lurch of lust and violence is Life with fucking chloroform fresh on His knuckles and you can't fucking scream, you can't fucking scream cos he's a ball-gag duct-taped tight in your gullet leaving moaning the only sound you can and will not make, screaming hateful fear flared wet through your red nostrils and the rope is thick but perhaps just thick enough to budge, the swarm of angels descending to savage ravaged he whose shadow crests your brow.
She used to sit with him, when he first demanded to be moved outside. It took seven of us, the Brewster boys past the quarry with us three Rex boys, strapped tight in sinewy youth but that sum'bitch bore a five foot girth in gut alone, laded leaden in the wallow of worship and pork-whiskey. Ma took the neck, wouldn't let anyone take the neck, and what with Pa's namesake, Steven, gripping thigh-wide ankles, and solemnal Solomon handfullin' Pa's right asscheek and me grippin' a good chunk of cheek myself, we grunted that motherfucker four whole feet 'fore his five hundred pounds bore itself gravity-bidden onto the barrow plank Steven threw together the night before.
Back then she would sit with him, and when the hiss of his lungs cracked to cough, spasms that buckled the beast, she would rub his chest, beneath the sun and moon, she would stroke his woolen chest, bare to glare still the pallid palling beneath the peppered-white thicket, and hum the hymnals of Bejeevus the Abject till Pa's settled throes whistled contrapuntal to her tight-lipped melody.
But Pa's been dying some time now, angel-ravaged or not, and I think Ma has had her fair share of shit. Tendin' death sucks fuck-luck outta skunks, licks pig prick to prig, dig? And he ain't fakin'. Jesus were he fakin', Bejeevus bedamn us—if he were fakin', I would bleed to earth that'un hoggen-wilde, fuckin' gut to ground his being in soil.
But he ain't fakin', been dyin' for years, seen him shit barf and sneeze cum, the man's just fallin' apart. Fucker of it all is that we don't know when the mass is going to pass, how long he can last, and if his dyin' word won't be the final function of Folly fain to fuck us all. But the man of burden is the burden of man, Blessed Bejeevus Bemused, as the child burdens till burdened—birth-written as heir damned air to err, he's sewn in me the seed of his undoing.
We played cards across his width when we were younger, though we ain't aged much now—Solomon pushin' driving, Steven pushin' teen, myself no caked out cracker yet—when Ma 'n Pa wept proud wet hot into my chest, my shakin' palms, they cursed me the first of them to matriculate, to wander urban the sprawl, past the confines of the oaken woods, branches noosed to swing Death in the black rustle of the courting night. So I went, I went and I saw and I lived like no other, burnt bridges and fucked queens, motherfucker, I've seen enough shit to know better, though shit if I've seen enough.
And she weeps. She always weeps come three, when he used to gather us for prayer, robed to hood in the black, purple, and grey of Bejeevus' Stigmatic Bruise. She misses that, Ma misses that about him. He was a passionate man, once.
She weeps now. It's three. Glare-beaten by the sun's relent ahind clouded walls of white, I consider again the blade in my boot, its serrate serenade cooing the calm of Pa's throatal length. I listen to Ma weep, and sigh fogged resolve onto the gleam unsheathed from Jocasta's brooch in the pale burn of fucking Phaeton's flaming flail arcing fatherless into the morrow.
- - -
I am a writing instructor for an online college as well as the local community college here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I have been published in the West Wind Review, Negative Suck, and here in Weirdyear.
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